Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Like adults, children *will*encounter people who lie to them. That's unavoidable, and probably not a bad thing in small doses! Unfortunately, many children do not have a *single* adult consistently present in their lives who is fully or near-fully honest with them.https://twitter.com/JosephDise/status/1041658323911798784 …

Lies communicate a lack of trust. We use them to manipulate others' perception of the world so they'll feel or behave differently from how they would if they had the truth. I think we underestimate how hard it is on kids to have to grow up in a distrustful environment.

I don't have a strong opinion on "holiday lies." I think some parents do a pretty good job of sort of "tipping off" their kids that this is a pretending-game for fun, but it's tricky. I do think these stories helped solidify lying to children as a cultural norm, which is no good.

indeed. if you are inadvertently raising a kid who's "half Vulcan" shit like lying about santa (vs just playing linguistic games) is a canary to us. you can do it maybe twice at most before we forever take everything you say with at least a grain of salthttps://twitter.com/ctzn5/status/1041728508500869122?s=21 …

Obviously false statements are auto-game territory ("I'm as big as a house! I crush cars under my feet! RAWR!" <chase ensues>) & linguistic trickery can be a more sophisticated game, but I do think the way most parents "do" Santa crosses a line we should try hard not to cross

exactly. adults treat children almost entirely incorrectly. bad for the kid, bad for society in time heuristic: treat children like you would a tiny adult stranger with total amnesia

hard to describe how fucking angry it makes me when i see toddlers pointing curiously at shit and just getting nonsense babytalk from the adults around them, or kids asking questions and getting autopilot responses aiming to cease further questions vs actually engage mindfully